Gál Éva: Margaret Island - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2000)

Palatinos today

can, and not a Premonstratensian church. A miraculously preserved tracery window high up in the western wall testifies to the fact that the originally Romanesque building was extended in Gothic style in the fourteenth century. Archaeologist Erzsébet Lócsy uncovered, during the excavations of the 1950s and 1960s, the surviving remains of the foundation walls that had once belonged to the Franciscan church and monastery which had sunk beneath the surface. Thus many previously unresolved issues were clarified.

As mentioned above, Palatine Joseph had his two- storey archducal residence built by the medieval wall- ruin. The condition of the building, once beautiful in its modest way, had badly deteriorated by the twentieth century but—patched up and extended in all sorts of ways—it survived until the end of World War 11. Around the beginning of the century it was converted into a hotel: the less well-to-do writers and artists visiting the island, such as Gyula Krúdy, Ernő Szép, Sándor Bródy and others stayed here when they spent some time on the island, sometimes even in the winter. In the inter-war years sports clubs rented rooms in the building, which was still called a castle; Flóris, the popular confection41